A couple of years ago I embarked on a journey that I had no idea would change my life as much as it did.

A colleague of mine told me about this project called –Intellimen -, that had the aim to form better men. Better fathers, better husbands, better bosses and employees, in short; better men over all.

When I heard about this project I was quite excited and thought that this would be a good idea for me to improve as a man. So I found an “official Buddy” (one of the requirements of the project is that you have someone who will do the whole process with you), and I started working on the weekly tasks.

I quickly found out that like many things I used to do in my life, I was very excited in the beginning, but that excitement fizzled out and I was soon struggling to keep up with the series of weekly challenges. After 10 challenges (10 weeks), I would forget to meet up or call my buddy to discuss the process for that week. My official buddy had to move to another country, and this was like a green light for me to just quit the project.

Perhaps like most men all over the globe, I knew too well what it meant to start things and not finish them. Whether it was taking on a new good habit, learning to do something new, looking after my health; all these things came to an end very quickly after I lost interest in them.

A year passed and I noticed some friends of mine that had now completed the whole year’s worth of challenges, and I could see in them different men. Men who were more responsible in their duties at work and families, and better overall versions of themselves. I saw this and thought to myself that I also could be a much better improved version of myself if I had gone until the end with this process.

After this day I vowed to myself to restart the whole challenge with a brand new official buddy, and that no matter what, every single week I would set some time aside to deal with every single challenge that was set before me. This time there was no “flash in the pan” excitement. Rather a steely determination to see this through until the end, and see where I could change for the better.

Two of the 53 challenges really had an impact on me. I remember one specific week we had a challenge to write 10 areas in our life that needed improvement. These were basically things I felt I neglected in my life, flaws, etc. It took me about 3 minutes to do this list of things that weren’t very good about myself. But on a separate week we had the complete opposite as a challenge. We had to write 10 qualities that we had about ourselves so that we could invest in these and develop them. Now; this became a real problem. I wrote 3 qualities and for the life of me could not go any further. I couldn’t see what else I was good at. So I spoke to my wife who quickly gave me a long list of things I did well. I spoke to my official buddy who had the same approach.

If this taught me anything, it was that we men sometimes can be our worse enemies. We fail at doing something and then register that area as a failure in our life. Once we start recording a few of these little things we didn’t succeed at, we can quickly start to see ourselves as a failure.

I could go on for hours talking about how this project has made me analyze various areas of my life to improve them. But if there is one thing the Intellimen project has taught me, is that no man is a finished product. We have a need to constantly become better at our work, marriage, relationships, and every area of our lives. And the only way to do this, is to come off our auto pilot mode and invest time in becoming this man.